


Be All Right For Another Night

by Sholio



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Families of Choice, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22047193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Five years after the Kree invasion, three orphaned kids poke through the ruins of what used to be upstate New York, right before their lives take yet another weird turn.
Relationships: Joy Meachum & Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	Be All Right For Another Night

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last fall for my h/c bingo "apocalypse" square and have been sitting on it for ... reasons? Anyway, it looks like I won't manage a bingo this year, but I wanted to get this up before the end of the year.
> 
> This is set in an AU in which the Kree successfully invaded Earth in 1995. The story takes place a few years later, around 2000.
> 
> If anyone is reading this based on the Captain Marvel tags but doesn't know Iron Fist, these are the kid versions of the IF characters long before the events of the show (they were canonically born in about 1986-91) and I think that's all you really need to know. Ward is about 14; Danny and Joy are around 9 or 10.
> 
> I'm just guessing at Monica's approximate age. I think she could be about 10 or 12 in CM, so I'm going with that.
> 
> I actually have thought about various other points of divergence between this AU and the canonical arcs of the other MCU characters, so I may eventually write more of this AU in other parts of the MCU.

Years ago, there had been a traffic jam on the New York Thruway. It was still there, but the cars were dead husks, the trees starting to reclaim the cracked and broken pavement.

When Ward and the kids came around a long curve in the freeway and were confronted with a sea of cars stretching to the next curve, his first fleeting thought was to take them another way. Stop them from seeing what was going to be in those cars. Then Joy said hopefully, "Do you think there's any food?" and he knew he couldn't. Because she wasn't wrong; there might be something they could eat, or use.

And anyway, there was nothing he could shield the kids from that they hadn't already seen. They'd been sleeping in dead people's houses, eating dead people's food, for years now. It was just a reflex, the same as the reflex that meant his hand was already in position to catch 9-year-old Danny by a strap of his backpack when Danny inevitably started to dart forward.

" _Wait_ a minute, would you? Let me check around first, and make sure there aren't zombie cannibals or something."

The kids giggled at this, but they also stayed behind him as he slung the rifle off his shoulder and went ahead of them to poke around the outskirts of the traffic jam. Some of the cars were burned, others scattered as if by a giant's hand. Many of them had their doors standing open, abandoned where they stood as their panicked owners fled -- for all the good it'd done them, he thought. 

The first car he bent down to look into had a giant wasp's nest on the underside of the roof. Wild animals had gotten into the seats, and had scattered the torn remains of clothing from an open suitcase in the back. There was no sign of bones or other human remains, but he still got an unpleasant lurch in his stomach at the ragged seats, the books and newspapers long since rain-soaked to illegibility. He got that feeling from abandoned houses too, not all of them, but especially the ones with their doors open, their interiors wrecked by wild animals and yet untouched otherwise. It was a reminder that there had been normal people here, adults and kids, people with lives, and now there weren't.

"Well?" Danny asked impatiently, and Ward straightened up so fast he banged his head on the door frame, fortunately not too close to the wasp's nest.

"Take off your packs and leave 'em here." The two obeyed, wiggling out of the straps of their child-sized backpacks. With the speed of extensive practice, Ward caught Danny again, and then Joy for good measure, though she was much less prone to dashing off like a wayward puppy. "Stay where you can see me, got it? Don't eat anything without asking me first, don't touch anything if you don't know what it is, and if you see anything that moves or makes noise or ... does anything else weird, get back to me pronto. I want a 'yes, Ward'."

"Yes, Ward," they chorused, and he let go. They zipped off as if shot out of a cannon.

Ward dropped his own pack alongside theirs, and clambered up to the top of an overturned 18-wheeler where he could keep lookout. They were going to be the death of him, if they weren't the death of themselves first. Little kids were reckless suicide machines. He was fourteen years old and he was pretty sure he had gray hairs because of those two.

He sat on top of the 18-wheeler with the sun warm on his shoulders and the rifle across his knees, listening to the kids' high-pitched calls and giggles. It felt good to just ... stop. He didn't know where the kids found the energy to run around like that. Though he supposed part of it was that he was carrying most of the weight of their supplies in his pack. And part of it was that _they_ didn't have to worry about things like what they were going to eat tonight and where they were going to spend the night.

It had been a very long five years.

From the top of the truck he couldn't see anything that looked dangerous on the road or in the woods around them. There was some movement far away, and he whipped up the binoculars and found that it was only a deer browsing alongside the road. He started to raise the rifle and then lowered it. He was getting to be a pretty decent shot, and with all the people gone, the countryside was overrun with animals -- rabbits, squirrels, deer. Cutting up animals for meat was something he'd learned on the fly, like everything else, so he wasn't precisely _good_ at it and there was no way to save the meat, but they could eat pretty good for a couple of days off a dead deer before moving on.

But that deer was too far away for his mediocre target skills, and he didn't want to waste the ammo. If they couldn't scavenge something to eat from the cars, the rabbits came out at dusk and he might be able to get one of those.

Food was their biggest issue, and it was a problem that never went away. For the first couple of years it had been easy, because they'd been in Dad's bunker upstate, and it was stocked to withstand a siege, at least for awhile. But it was never meant for people to live there forever. The food had run out eventually, and they'd had to start moving.

Mrs. Rand had taken them there originally, but she ... hadn't made it. He didn't want to think about that. It still gave him nightmares, all of it did. The whole thing had the quality of a nightmare, even now -- that final panicked flight out of the city. Dad had somehow gotten his hands on a helicopter for their escape, and Ward remembered holding Joy in his lap while Mrs. Rand held Danny, and looking down on the roads utterly clogged, like this one, with people trying to flee. Remembered the countryside with flames everywhere, the alien ships, the alien patrols ...

He didn't know how much of it Danny and Joy could remember, but after Mrs. Rand died, it had taken Danny weeks to start talking again.

They'd been so tiny then, Danny and Joy. Ward had been nine years old and found himself suddenly alone and responsible for two four-year-olds. No adults ever came. They stayed at the bunker for two years, nursing along their dwindling supply of food, venturing out when the cabin fever got so bad that Ward was ready to strangle the little brats. The bunker was down a long dirt road in the mountains. Back in those early days, it was pretty common to see alien ships fly over, but they never saw any actual aliens and eventually the ships stopped coming too.

When they left the bunker, Ward was eleven, the kids were six, and he had no idea where they were going to go or what they were going to do. All he knew was that they had to go somewhere else or starve.

In all honesty, he still didn't know what they were going to do. He didn't dare think more than a few days ahead. Life was a never-ending struggle to survive. It was getting easier in some ways because he was older and more capable now, and better at it -- he was sometimes amazed that they'd survived those first few months after leaving the bunker, especially the first winter, which they'd spent holed up in an abandoned hunting lodge beside a lake. But it was also getting harder because they were increasingly having trouble finding food. In the early days, it was just a matter of finding an abandoned house and taking what they wanted from its canned goods and shelf-stable snack foods. He wished he could go back and kick his younger self for not saving more of it while he could. At the time it didn't seem to matter. They ate what they needed and didn't worry about carrying things with them.

But now, food that was unspoiled and not dangerously past its expiration date was harder to find, and they were increasingly coming to towns that had been completely cleaned out of anything useful. Which was a good sign, he supposed. It meant there were people still, and perhaps quite a lot of them. But their experiences with strange adults hadn't been very pleasant so far. They'd run into a handful of other roaming scavengers, had been robbed twice, and once Ward had to stick a knife in a full-grown man to get him to drop Joy. Ward desperately wanted to find adults, someone to hand off his responsibilities to. But at the same time, while it was just them, nobody could hurt them or separate them or ...

He sat up abruptly. He'd been leaning back on the top of the 18-wheeler, resting on his hands on the sun-warmed metal, but adrenaline jolted through him as he caught sight of something near the horizon, in the sky, moving fast. It was bright and moving arrow-straight. Definitely _not_ a bird.

"Hey! Kids!" His voice came out as a panicked squawk. He tried again. "Joy! Danny! Get back here now!"

He had to yell it a couple more times, and as he scrambled off the truck, he thought that the bright, fast-moving thing was definitely closer. _Damn it, damn it._ In the very early days after they left the bunker, they would occasionally see alien ships high up. They always hid, and had never been seen. But it had been over a year since he'd seen anything like that. He had thought they were gone. Hoped they were gone.

"Ward, look!" Joy panted as the kids came pelting back. She held up a handful of foil-wrapped objects. "I found food! I didn't eat them, just like you said." She pointed to a torn corner of one wrapper. "Danny did that, but I made him stop."

"Forget about that." Ward looked around wildly. The cars were the only shelter in sight. They had so many windows, though. The back of the 18-wheeler might be better. He herded the kids around to the back. By that point they had both caught his urgent mood.

"What's happening?" Danny whispered. 

"Code red," Ward snapped. They had a color-code system, red and orange and yellow and green. Red meant "shut up and hide." He'd started doing that in the early days because he needed something easy he could say to them to just get them to stop asking questions and _do what they were told_ without having to explain. It worked and it kept working because he didn't use Code Red unless he really meant it.

And it worked now. They shut up and stuck with Ward like two little burrs, so close he was almost tripping over them.

The back doors of the semi were buckled and slightly ajar, but they'd also rusted in place. Ward struggled uselessly to open enough of a space to get them all inside. The little kids might still fit. "Get in there!" he whispered at them.

"But it's dark," Joy said.

"-- and scary --"

"Get _in,_ you brats!" he snapped, boosting them through the opening over their protests. "Get in there, stay in there, and stay quiet!"

Two small, pale faces looked back at him from the truck's dark interior. "Ward!" Joy protested. "Come in with us!"

"Eww," Danny said. "I just stepped on something that squished."

"I can't get in, I don't fit. Be quiet!" He turned his back on them and pressed against the doors, covering the opening as much as he could. Inside, some sort of whispered argument had started up, something about Danny wanting to be where Joy was and Joy not wanting to move. There was a scuffle. 

"Shhhh!" he hissed at them over his shoulder.

He crouched down a little, because if the whatever-it-was actually _was_ a spaceship, the chances were good that it'd just pass overhead without bothering them as long as they stayed out of sight. That was how it had always worked before. But the sky stayed clear and blue. No ships. Had it gone off a different way? Or --

And then there was light, bright streamers of gold, and a woman floated down out of the sky in front of Ward.

She looked human, but then, he didn't actually know what aliens looked like because he'd never seen one up close, and she was just floating there in a golden halo of light with her arms folded and her blonde hair waving gently around her head as if she was underwater. Ward pointed the rifle at her with arms that trembled so violently he could barely hold it. He was so scared he thought he might be sick.

All this time, all that running, all that hiding ...

"It's okay, kid," the shining lady said. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm Carol. How about you put the gun down so we can talk?"

"Are you an alien?" he managed to ask through chattering teeth.

"No," she said with a smile that was a little bit sad. "No, I'm human. Like you."

Trembling hands or not, he kept the rifle aimed at her midsection. He might not have seen many adults in the last five years, but he was pretty sure that glowing and flying were not skills that everyone spontaneously developed at puberty. "You can fly."

"Yes, I can. I've been modified using alien technology. But I'm not with them; I'm fighting them. I'm a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I can help you."

She dropped to the ground and the glow died away. Without it, she looked like a perfectly normal adult lady, but he also hadn't had much luck with adults lately. Ward kept tight hold of the rifle.

"Come on, kid," Carol said quietly. She held out a hand and closed her fingers lightly over the muzzle of the rifle, pushing it down. "That's not going to hurt me."

And then suddenly Ward was getting jostled from both sides as the kids erupted out of hiding.

"I told you two to stay put!" he snapped, so furious he could hardly think. Also, the sudden kid-swarming had almost made him pull the trigger without meaning to. 

"Leave us alone!" Joy said, tiny fists clenched. "Don't hurt my big brother!"

"Yeah!" Danny chimed in, both of them about as intimidating as a pair of angry puppies.

Ward had to give up on the rifle and let it swing from its strap while he used both hands to shove them behind him. It was like trying to hold onto Jello. "Stay!" he grunted, getting a fistful of Joy's sweater with his hand around Danny's arm.

"Are these your brother and sister?" Carol asked.

"Yeah," Ward said warily. Explaining that Danny was technically some other people's kid was too complicated, and anyway, that part had stopped mattering awhile back. "Stay away from them. You two, stay away from _her!_ Would you stop _wiggling?"_

Carol crouched down, bringing her to eye level with the little kids. She was wearing some kind of red-blue-and-gold armor, light and flexible, but gleaming in a way that made it clear it wasn't fabric. "Hi," she said. "You're very brave kids, protecting your brother like that. All of you have been through a lot, I can see that. Are there any adults around, or is it just the three of you?"

"Our parents are right nearby," Ward said quickly, at the same time as Joy said, "It's just us." Ward firmly pushed the children behind him again.

"I see." A sad look crossed Carol's face. "Listen, I'm out looking for people who need help. I know you probably don't have much reason to trust strangers, and I don't blame you. But if you'd like something to eat and a place to stay, you can come with me."

"Food?" Danny said, perking up. "You have food?"

Ward waffled, caught in a horrible crisis of indecision. Everything the lady had said so far sounded exactly like what an alien trying to trap children _would_ say.

But he had nothing to feed the kids except the long-expired granola bars Joy had found. He'd put them to bed hungry more times than he wanted to think about, and he hated it. If wherever the shining lady wanted to take them had food, and walls and a roof, and beds ... maybe it was worth it. 

Maybe it was time to admit that they couldn't keep going on as they'd been going. He looked down at the kids, really looked at them, as this lady must be seeing them: filthy, with their hair unbrushed, and Danny's hair as long as Joy's because Ward didn't have a good way of cutting it and Danny didn't seem to mind. They were skinny and bruised and looked like the little refugees that they were. He was used to it; they were all used to it. But looking at them like that, seeing them suddenly from the adult viewpoint, made him sick with guilt. They deserved something better than what he'd been able to give them.

"If we did come with you, where would you take us?" he asked.

Carol smiled, a full smile this time, the kind of happy infectious grin that made Ward have to grab onto his distrust with both fists because it was so hard not to smile along with her. Danny's mom had been like that. "I have a spaceship. It's not too far from here. Would you like to go there?"

"You have a _spaceship?"_ Joy said, round-eyed, and both kids looked up at Ward beseechingly.

Carol straightened up and looked at him, really looked at him, in a grown-up to grown-up kind of way; he felt suddenly, terribly shy. "You can eat there, and stay as long as you want. They'll be safe, and so will you. But it's up to you. If you decide you don't want to, I understand, and I'll respect that. If you need some time to decide, I can give you a, um, a radio so you can contact me later if you change your mind."

Ward took a shaking breath. Having more time to think about it would be nice. But he also felt like, if he didn't do it now, he'd just end up making the same decision an hour from now, or two days, or whenever the next time was that he had nothing to feed the kids, or they were sick because the food had spoiled, and they were all cold and wet and -- he just needed something _better_ for them, before they all died out here.

"Yes," he said. His voice cracked in the middle. "Yes, we'll come with you. How do we get there?"

"I'll carry you," Carol said.

"All three of us?" Ward asked skeptically.

That bright grin flashed again. "It's no problem for me, trust me. I can carry all three of you easily. Ready to go?"

Somewhat to Ward's relief, the kids looked up at him for approval rather than throwing themselves onto the stranger. Now that the novelty was wearing off, shyness had begun to reassert itself. They weren't used to being around anyone except him.

"We have to get our packs," he said. Most of what was in the packs they probably wouldn't need -- survival gear, ammo -- but there were also things he didn't want to leave behind: birthday presents, keepsakes, pictures.

Carol nodded and came with him to the place where they'd left the packs. Ward helped the smaller kids on with theirs, and then picked up the rifle again, which he'd set down to have his hands free to help them.

"You won't need that," she said.

"I'd rather have it."

"It's going to be awkward, and you'll need your hands to hold on." She smiled slightly. "When we get to the ship, if you would feel more comfortable with a gun, we can give you a much better one."

Ward hesitated, then leaned the rifle against the side of the truck. It felt weird to leave it behind. It wasn't the first gun he'd had -- along the way, there had been a series of them, left behind as they were lost to robbers or ran out of the right kind of ammo. A lot of people in rural New York were hunters, and he'd had his pick of guns to choose from. But ever since they'd left the bunker, he'd never been farther than a hand's distance from a gun of some kind.

"What now?" he asked.

"Hold the little kids, and I'll hold you."

Ward put an arm around each of the kids -- they clung to him anxiously -- and Carol put her arms around him from behind. It was strange and claustrophobic, too intimate and yet so much like a mother's embrace that it made his chest ache. He got hugged by the kids all the time, but he hadn't been touched like this by an adult since ... well ... since his mom died, which had been years before the aliens came. Dad didn't hug. And Mrs. Rand was busy with Danny, and then she died, and ... well. It wasn't something he was used to, that was all.

"Ready?" Carol said, and he nodded, and then they were airborne, producing shrieks of delight from the kids.

Carol didn't say anything else about the made-up parents, and Ward didn't mention it. He knew they both knew he was lying.

* * *

Carol landed in a canyon, in a big clearing surrounded by trees, and set them down. Ward got his feet under him, and got his breath, and held on very tightly to the little kids. _That_ was something he sure hoped he never had to do again.

"That was _amazing,"_ Danny said, starry-eyed.

Ward looked around as Carol did something with a thick metal bracelet around her forearm, fiddling with it. There was no sign of any structure nearby, let alone a spaceship, and he wished he'd brought the gun after all -- when all of a sudden there _was_ a ship, huge and gleaming in the sun and looking exactly as a spaceship should, looming above them.

"Come on up," Carol said. "I've let the others know to expect guests."

_Others?_ Ward thought. She hadn't mentioned others. He held the kids' grubby hands and followed Carol up a ramp that lowered in front of them, into the ship's echoing interior, full of metallic smells and, yes, other people.

If you could call them that.

They were aliens. Lizard aliens, busy moving crates and otherwise going about their lizard-alien business. Some of them turned to look, and Ward shrank back, holding onto the kids, who clung to him and tried to hide behind him again.

It wasn't just the lizard aliens freaking him out. It was the sheer overwhelming too-muchness of it. For a terrible minute his head swam and he thought he might faint. He hadn't been around this many people, aliens or otherwise, in five years. He thought wildly about running back down the ramp and into the woods, but then it slammed shut behind him, locking him in. With them.

"Oh ... damn. I didn't think," Carol said. "I'm so used to -- they're Skrulls. They're on our side. Monica!"

"Coming!" A perfectly human-looking girl, a couple of years older than Ward, darted out from behind some lizard people. "Hi, hi! I'm Monica! Come with me. Aunt Carol called ahead and I've cleared out a room for you. You can get cleaned up there, take a shower, that kind of thing. I'll find some clean clothes for you to change into. I bet we have something about your size."

Ward followed her in a state of total overwhelm. The kids, mute with shock, held onto him, one on each side. He felt a little better once they were away from the cargo bay, or whatever it was, with all the lizard people, but now they were in echoing metal corridors and everything was alien, and too close and strange, and too _inside_. He could barely breathe.

He became aware that Monica had asked a question. "What?" he said.

"I asked, what are your names?"

"Ward," he said numbly. "And this is Joy, and this is Danny."

"Hi there, Joy, Danny," Monica said to the kids. "We're going to have lunch soon. I'll make sure there's cookies and ice cream, okay? You look like you'd like that."

The kids looked up at Ward again, mute and shy, looking to him for answers. Cookies they knew only as stale things in packages, and it occurred to him that they probably didn't remember ice cream at all. He didn't say anything.

Monica waved her hand at what looked like a wall, and the kids (and Ward) jumped when a door whisked open. Inside was a small room with a bunk bed built into the wall, a little table beside it. Ward thought of campers from family driving trips, long ago when driving trips were something that still happened, when a family was a thing he had.

"The bathroom's here," Monica said, doing the same handwave thing to the wall. "Controls are pretty similar to Earth showers. You can let me know if you have any trouble. There are towels in the storage drawers under the bed. I'll go get something for you to wear, okay?"

Ward could only nod. She smiled at them again, and left. The door shut. His claustrophobia skyrocketed, bordering on a panic attack.

The children both started to whimper, and Ward got himself under control. He was the one in charge. _He_ couldn't panic or they both would too.

"It's okay," he told them, hoping it was. "Let's all take off our packs, okay? And then we'll get cleaned up."

The kids perked up after he took off their packs, getting interested in looking around. "What's this?" Joy asked, putting a grubby hand on the shower enclosure.

... right. They had been four years old the last time they could even conceivably have had a shower, and babies mostly got baths, didn't they? They might never have had showers in their lives. What they knew about keeping clean was scrubbing off in cold streams or taking sponge baths beside a fire.

"I'll show you how it works."

The controls were enough like the normal showers from his vague childhood memories that he was able to figure them out, and the novelty of water cascading down from the ceiling was enough to fascinate the kids. Ward helped them peel out of their filthy clothes. They were young enough that they didn't really mind being naked around each other -- they were all used to it, the three of them; there had been next to no privacy for any of them for the last five years -- so Ward put them in to shower together and left them with firm instructions to wash each other's hair.

He was staring at the packs, not sure whether to unpack a few of their things like he was setting up camp or keep them ready for a quick exit, when there was a knock on the door and Monica's voice called, "Are you decent?"

"Yeah? I ... guess so?"

"I mean, are you naked?"

"Oh." He found himself blushing. "No, I mean, it's fine. The kids are showering."

Monica came in with a bundle in her arms. "Here, this is some stuff from the Skrull kids that should fit you guys. It's mostly human clothing anyway, because the Skrulls are refugees like us, and don't have a lot of things of their own."

_Like us._ She said it so casually, but Ward had to struggle to blink back tears, because he didn't want to cry in front of a stranger. The only "us" for the last five years had been him and the little kids.

Before he could get too flustered, there was a plaintive wail of "Waaaaard!" from the bathroom.

"Gotta go, sorry," he stammered, and ducked into the bathroom to find out what completely preventable crisis was happening _now._

It turned out to involve Danny having gotten soap in his eyes and neither child having any idea how to cope because they'd never experienced it before. Ward got them calmed down and rinsed and wrapped up in towels.

He wasn't expecting to find Monica still in the room, but when he came out of the steamy bathroom with the kids, she was sitting on the bottom bunk looking nervous. She jumped to her feet at the sight of them. "Oh -- so -- I was thinking I could watch the little kids for you? So you can take a shower yourself."

His first reaction was a hot rush of anger and jealousy that startled him with its intensity. The word "no" was on the verge of coming out. He made himself swallow it back down. The kids would probably be okay if he just told them to sit quietly in the room and left the bathroom door open so he could see them, but what if they decided to go wander the ship?

"I'm a good babysitter," Monica said, taking his silence for the refusal that he hadn't quite managed to articulate. "I watch little kids for my Skrull friends all the time. And this will be easier because these kids can't turn into anything else to try to sneak away." Ward just stared at her in blank bafflement. She held up a small T-shirt. "Let's see if this fits either of them, okay?"

Between them, they got the kids dressed, and then Ward picked up the remaining clothing -- it did look about his size -- and a towel. "Be good," he told the kids, and went into the bathroom. 

"Ward!" they wailed. That made him feel a little better, a little less jealous and hurt. The bathroom door starting to open while he was in the middle of getting undressed, okay so _that_ , not so much.

"Out!" he ordered, pushing Danny back while trying to hide behind the door, blushing furiously. "I'll be out in a minute. You two play with Monica, and be _good!"_

"I'm sorry!" Monica said from somewhere thankfully out of sight. "I didn't realize they were going to try --"

"It's okay, they're not used to not being with me, that's all." He got the door shut again, looked for a lock and couldn't find one. But he stood there for a minute anyway, listening to the sound of voices on the other side, as the tearful complaining turned into laughter as Monica distracted them. And then he started feeling jealous and bitter again, so he got into the shower.

It actually _was_ weird to have hot water coming down from above. He hadn't been properly clean in five years. He looked down at himself, skinny and scarred, and so filthy that the water was brown by the time it sluiced down the drain.

The one thing he hadn't taken off was the necklace he wore everywhere, normally tucked underneath his shirt. It was a bunch of different items on a piece of twine: shells, washers, stray beads. Kid treasures. He fingered it with wet, soapy fingers.

* * *

"Don't _you_ have a birthday, Ward?" Joy had asked at her eighth birthday party. 

He'd made her birthday cake, as he had gotten in the habit of doing, by mixing a box of cake mix with water, since he didn't have any other ingredients, and baking it in a saucepan over a fire he built in the yard of the house they were staying in, gas and electricity -- and therefore ovens -- being things of the past except in those cases when they managed to find a rural house with a propane tank. The cake was flat and charred around the edges, and not much like Ward's increasingly vague recollections of what birthday cakes were supposed be like, kind of more like a sweet, dry, very solid pancake, but the kids seemed to like it.

At least toys for presents weren't hard to come by, with all these abandoned houses to scavenge from. The tricky thing was choosing things that the kids might truly enjoy, that would be light enough to carry and they wouldn't have to leave behind right away. Back in the bunker, he'd had to make gifts for them out of folded food wrappers and cans. But birthdays were important; he'd figured that out in the bunker, too. Birthdays and other holidays. It was the only way to break up the monotony of the days back then, and now that they were out, it gave the kids something to look forward to and whisper about. He'd been keeping track of the days using his fancy watch that told the date as well as the time, but the face of the watch was starting to get hard to read as the numbers faded, and he knew he'd soon have to go over to keeping track of time some other way.

But he hadn't thought of his own birthday in a long time. He noted it, when it happened, and that was about it. 

"Yeah, of course I have a birthday."

"But _when?"_ the kids pressed. Now that they'd figured out he hadn't had a birthday present in years, they seemed horrified by the concept.

"It's in September." And then he had to explain calendars and months again, a concept they were both somewhat hazy on.

Joy's birthday was located conveniently close to Danny's -- his in April, hers in June -- but now he had to endure constant questions of "Is it September yet?" The closer it got, the more not-very-quiet whispering went on behind his back, so it wasn't like he could possibly not know they were planning something.

But even knowing that, he was still taken off guard by how much work they put into it. He left them alone all morning, as much as he could bring himself to do, working on mending backpack straps in the yard of that day's abandoned house. With the windows open, he could hear them inside. Having them out of sight still put him on edge, but he was just about able to handle it as long as he stayed focused on the sound of their voices.

When they called him in, he found that they'd decorated an entire room with paper scraps, mostly pages torn out of magazines. They'd made him a card, misspelled and clumsily drawn on folded paper the same way he'd been making their cards. (It alarmed him to realize that nearly all they knew of birthday and other holiday traditions was what he'd taught them.) They had even made him a _cake_ \-- an absolutely horrible cake, a gooey uncooked mess, but he ate some anyway. 

And they had presents. Pretty decent presents, too: a knife from the kitchen, a T-shirt they'd found somewhere that was the same color as the comfortable blue one Ward had worn until it fell apart. And the necklace, a weird little art object made from whatever they'd found that would stay on a string. It was weird and ridiculous, it was a little too heavy to be comfortable and it jangled when he was trying to hunt. And he never took it off.

* * *

Five years was a long time.

Ward soaped his hair and tried to let his mind go blank, but thoughts kept shoving in anyway.

Thoughts like ... having adults around, even if they were weird adults, changed everything. Adults had definite ideas about how kids ought to be raised, and how they were supposed to behave and look and talk. What if the adults thought he was doing a terrible job of taking care of Danny and Joy, and decided to take them away? Worse, what if they were _right?_ He wasn't good at any of the things that adults thought were important, like keeping them clean and making sure they ate balanced meals. It was all he could do to make sure they had food at all. And he didn't even know how to be their schoolteacher as well as their parent-substitute; he'd only gone to school through the fourth grade himself. He'd tried to teach them to read and do math, with varying levels of success, but most of what they'd learned had been the kind of lessons that adults could not possibly approve of, like how to cut up a dead rabbit and hide from strangers and -- oh god, what if the grown-ups found out that he'd taught them both to shoot a gun? That all by itself might be enough to get them taken away from him.

He screwed his eyes shut under the shower and turned the water even hotter.

When he finally stepped out, he felt a little wobbly-legged. There was high-pitched kid laughter from the outer room, and he tried (and failed) not to be jealous, again. The clothes Monica had given him fit decently, the jeans a little too short, the T-shirt a little too large, but no worse than the scavenged, mismatched clothes he'd been finding for himself. He looked at his own thin, solemn face in the mirror, and tied back his long hair with the rubber band he used to ponytail it. Then he opened the door.

Monica, he found, was brushing the kids' hair; this was the source of all the giggling. She'd braided Joy's hair into a complicated braid on top of her head, like Ward had occasionally seen on adult ladies in magazines. Joy kept reaching up and nervously touching it. Now Monica was combing out Danny's damp blond curls. Ward tried not to resent that Danny hated having _Ward_ mess with his hair. As usual, he failed.

"What's it look like, Ward?" Joy was trying to see her own hair, turning around, giggling. "It feels weird."

It made her look almost grown up, he thought in horror. It made her look like Mom. 

"Ward?" Joy asked, wide-eyed.

"It's ..." But he couldn't tell her he hated it. He took a breath, groping for compliments, trying to remember how compliments even worked. "Pretty. It's really pretty."

Joy giggled and hugged him around the waist, which improved things a little, and then someone else knocked on the door, which turned out to be the shining lady, Carol, carrying a sleek silver basket with a handle.

"Settling in okay?" Carol asked. "I was thinking we could have a picnic up on the observation deck. I would suggest outside, but we don't want to risk drawing attention to the ship. This is the next best thing."

They trooped up some hallways and stairs, encountering no aliens along the way, though the kids both clung to Ward's hands. They came out, eventually, in what looked like a sort of indoor garden with potted plants and the sky overhead. The kids goggled around at it. Ward tried to look cool and unimpressed.

"Are we still in the ship?" Joy asked.

Carol answered before Ward could; he wasn't honestly sure. "Yes. There's a dome." She held out a hand, and her fingers stopped in midair. "See? Try it."

The kids enjoyed the novelty of pressing their hands on what looked like empty air. Ward touched it too, and found that there was no sensation of glass; his hand just stopped in midair. That was creepy. He herded the kids away from it, and then just stood there, not really sure where to sit or what to do, until Monica went and sat on a patch of grass, and patted it. 

"Come on," she said. "It's nice up here, isn't it? Almost like being outside. Do you guys like picnics?" she asked, directing the question to the little kids.

"I don't know," Danny said, and shoved his thumb in his mouth, something he hadn't done for years.

All they knew was picnics, Ward thought. He could see from the look on Monica's face that she was figuring that out, too. But she got up and helped the kids sit down, and Carol began unpacking the basket, quietly and calmly talking to the little kids, telling them what each item was.

And Ward ... _resented_ her, resented both of them. He hated that he felt that way, but he did. He ached to go off somewhere and just _get away,_ but he couldn't leave the kids alone with them, and anyway ... the food. He was not only starving, but he hadn't seen most of this stuff for years. He didn't even know what some of it was.

So he sat at the edge of their dumb little picnic, and the kids decided to sit on either side of him, leaning against him, half in his lap while they tried new foods like "sandwiches" and "cookies." Ward tried not to feel smug that they wanted to stay close to him, and failed, but it did make him feel a little less awful about things. So far nobody had said anything about taking the kids away. But he'd really feel a lot better about this if the strange adult lady would just _say what she was planning._

"Do you mind if we ask you some questions?" Carol asked, as if echoing his thoughts. She nodded to Monica, who had some kind of thing in her lap -- a computer, maybe? But smaller and flatter than any computer Ward had ever seen, more like a kids' toy. "We're compiling a database to try to reunite people with their family members, so we'd like to get a few details from you. We don't have to do this now, if you don't want to."

"I guess so," he said reluctantly.

"So what we need is your full names, birthdates, and where you're from," Monica said, running a fingertip across her computer-thing. "And the names of any close relatives, parents and other siblings and that stuff. Anything else that might help us find the rest of your family."

Ward dutifully gave them the information. This was the point when he had to give Danny's full name and they were going to know he was lying about Danny being his brother, but they didn't say anything about it. Also, it meant he had to tell them Danny's mom was dead, which made Danny go very quiet and still against Ward's side. Ward put an arm around him, and then Joy snuggled on him from the other side, and they all just kind of sat there for a little while, as Monica finished typing in their data.

There was still food left from the picnic. Ward had eaten as much as he could and he eyed what was left. He wondered if they'd notice if he just ... took some of it. There were bulges in the pockets of Joy and Danny's new clothes, so he wasn't the only one who'd thought of that.

"Does this look right?" Monica asked. She turned the computer around and showed him the screen. He leaned forward to see it, and corrected her spelling of his last name.

"So is there any chance that this might ... work?" Ward asked cautiously, looking up at her. "I mean, that some of our relatives might still be out there. How many other people are still alive?" 

"Millions," Carol said, and Ward's eyes opened wide. "Hundreds of millions, perhaps. Most of the major population centers were destroyed, it's true, but the Kree took most of the survivors as slaves. Some were distributed off the planet, but many remained here, working on giant forced-labor farms in the agricultural centers of your world, or in factories. We're working on freeing them."

"We?" It came out tiny.

"The resistance," Carol said, grinning fiercely in a way that made her look suddenly not so friendly after all. Then it changed back to her usual infectious smile, tinged with sorrow. "There's no guarantee that we can find your family, in fact it's a very long shot, but there are places you can go. Safe places, where you can all grow up."

This was all hitting too hard and too fast, so he was glad when Joy wordlessly held up a carton of ice cream and he had to help her open it; it gave him something to do, somewhere to look that wasn't them. "Like what kind of places?" he couldn't help asking.

"Free settlements on Earth, for one thing," Carol said. "However, if you have no particular attachment to staying on Earth, we're headed back to Xandar, and you can come with us. They've been taking in a lot of Earth refugees, and it'll be a lot more comfortable for you to adjust to. The free Earth settlements are still fairly primitive, and under constant threat of attack."

"What's Xandar?" Ward asked, grabbing onto the one thing he'd managed to retain frrom the rest of it.

"It's a planet, kind of like Earth," Monica said. He risked a glance at her. She had the computer in her lap and was smiling at him, though her smile got a little ... weird. Sad. "Well, like Earth used to be, I guess. That's where Mom and I live. Aunt Carol took us there, when -- well, you know. Kree." She looked up at Carol. "You know, we don't have to try to place them with a host family, Aunt Carol. They could just stay with us for a while, and decide what they want to do."

"Your mom is going to have final veto power over that, kiddo." Carol looked at Ward. "I don't want to pressure you, but we're on a schedule, and we need to leave soon. We'll need to either drop you off at a settlement or take you with us. If you come with us and change your mind, it's not forever. We can bring you back to Earth the next time we come. All things considered, though, Xandar's a lot safer than here, because there's still fighting going on here, but Xandar is deep in Nova Corps space."

All of that went past Ward in an incomprehensible flood. But the part of it he understood was that they had food, and they were willing to share their food, and if he went with them, he might keep getting food.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay. We'll go with you."

"Yay!" Monica said. "You can come live with us. It'll be great. I'll let you ride my hovercycle."

Her delight faded when she seemed to notice he wasn't excited about it. Why bother? It didn't matter where they went, not really. There was no point in staying here. The world he did feel attached to -- a world with McDonald's and Must See TV and cars and showers -- was five years gone and wasn't coming back.

Carol cleared her throat and stood up. "In that case, I'm going to go tell Talos that we can take off and prepare for the jump to Nova Corps space. Monica, do you want to stay here with them?"

"We don't need a babysitter," Ward told her as Carol left. Especially someone who was barely older than he was.

"I'm not here to babysit you. I'm just here to let you know what to expect. Going through a hyperspace jump can be a _lot_ the first time if you're not used to it." She started to reach out to pat his arm, then pulled back when he flinched away. "Look, I know you've been through some really awful stuff. But you'll be safe with us. I promise."

"Okay," Ward said agreeably. He didn't know _safe._ He didn't even really care where they were going, as long as there was food and clean clothes for the kids and nothing trying to kill them. And so far no one had tried to separate them, and that was good.

The kids drooped on either side of him, half asleep, and he looked up at the sky overhead. It was darkening and deepening. Was it evening already? The stars had begun to come out.

"This is space," Monica said quietly. "We need some time to get to the jump point. It'll take a while."

"You mean we're in space _now?"_ He hadn't felt the ship move. Not at all. He had thought they were still sitting on the ground.

Monica nodded. Her eyes shone. "Cool, huh? Do you want to learn to fly a ship? Aunt Carol is teaching me to fly hers. It's a little ship, not like this one, but I can teach you too if Mom says okay."

"Yeah, okay," he said, pulling up his legs with his knees pressed to his chest. He snuck a hand down and stole a half sandwich, tucked it into his pocket. Monica didn't seem to notice, or didn't say anything if she had. Instead she looked up at the stars. 

It _was_ peaceful here. The kids drowsed on him, heavy little weights cuddled close on either side. They had started sleeping like that in the bunker after losing their parents, all three of them piled up together, and just kind of never really stopped.

"Monica?" he said quietly. If he was ever going to get answers out of her, it would be now, with no adults around. "Where are they really taking us?"

"To Xandar, of course," Monica said. Her eyes were wide, her expression open. If she was lying, she was good at it. As if she'd read his mind, she went on, "Ward ... nobody is lying to you. Not Aunt Carol or me or anyone here. You're going to be okay and we're going to find a new home for you and your sister and brother, okay?"

"Okay." He didn't know if he believed her or not, but he just ... couldn't deal with any more uncertainty right now. He tucked his face into Joy's hair, inhaled the clean smell of shampoo and little kid. The kids curled up tight against him and he put an arm around each of them, and he wasn't looking up for the brief dizzy moment of his first hyperspace jump.


End file.
